134 5 4
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He gets her voicemail.
Maureen calls back.
“Where are you, Tom? I hear cars.”
Where is he? Here he is. Cars, yes, and sidewalk, stores, faces topping bodies. Night again. A bad place. He sees a park – an empty set of swings and troughs of
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778 5 2
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Everything's inflatable. Here we go. It's all plastic. Give it a rest, kid.You could say that I just want to enjoy nothing for now. But. Let's go ahead and buy into its precisely sealed with a rubber stamped kiss kind of survival rate statistic for…
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1450 5 5
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We spend our days on the beach, working on our tans. My pale wife hides under a big floppy hat. The water is crystal clear.
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1371 5 5
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The boy stared out his window, noting the suns slow and eventual passing behind the distant mountains. He saw his face reflected in the window pane and turned away. His shadow loomed…
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1816 5 3
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Another Saturday in April. Another set of scars.
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2720 5 3
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It came from the animal shelter, seizing and shivering, with eyes almost bigger than its head. Eyes that followed Pearl like it couldn’t stuff the whole picture of her in its tiny skull.
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1238 5 1
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As with the trouble with gambling, I managed to spend beyond my self-suggested limit at the farm while wanting to do little else. It became a chase for "money" (numbers like rubles) ...
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1577 5 3
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I remember a big Walgreen’s Drug store (maybe in Elmhurst, or Oakbrook Center?) and this shopping expedition we went on. That’s where you bought your first Dust Buster, I believe (or was this another man?) Anyway, you made me carry everything. We didn’t
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1745 5 2
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He is sitting in his bedroom trying to decide what to wear. He has an appointment at five. If he wants to make it he has to either catch the bus, which comes in about fifteen minutes, or drive in. If he wants to drive in he needs to put petrol in his car,
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1570 5 5
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The baby will not stop crying.
He’s been crying for three hours straight.
I’m the worst mother ever.
What kind of mother can’t soothe her own baby?
The bad kind.
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1379 5 3
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"Do you kiss all of your models?"
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818 5 5
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A few weeks ago I was sitting at my desk when I began feeling a sharp pain in the area of my back just above the hip. I got down on the floor and lied on my side to alleviate the pain however I could. It lasted about ten minutes and slowly dissipated. Is this a kidney…
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1416 5 0
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JOSEPH YOUNG Joseph Young You might start with the top of the head, where the heat goes. This is first, first from the womb, the first word. Joseph Young There might have been a faith that placed it in the mouth, not the…
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2186 5 3
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Excessively. And this worried her, of course.
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1241 5 5
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I was supposed to write a history of the old world and expose the selfish ones who use their best kept love for evil against the good little witches of childhood, but it made no sense to me to go after them in that obvious a way. They…
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1602 5 4
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If I do not hear you leaving by the door... The nearness here of this yet questions when I know you will not come so back again, Nowise the same as you were there before. My own reflection, centred at its core On knowing each …
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994 5 5
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"...regurgitating double A's
all akimbo."
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1236 5 1
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When Veronica Lake died today of hepatitis, / he didn't blink an eye
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1671 5 3
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She came to my house late that last night and shucked off her things and we slow-danced to Cruisin' as beaded rainwater slid off her black hair to the floor. She smiled an almost quizzical smile as she drank me there with her eyes, as if I was some…
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874 5 1
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Mask the stench/
with frankincense.
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1421 5 3
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“I can't go to sleep,” Jonathan said, laying on the doctor's couch. He counted on his fingers to keep his mind active. “I'll certainly die if I do.”
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1546 5 5
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I asked her how she came to be at our little party. We all knew she was an intern. What would she want with the likes of us, the orderlies and techs and strays? She just held up Ed's flyer and said, "Why not?" But she didn't look happy. We fired up and someone said, "Let's…
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1703 5 1
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Some things are meant to be repeated
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1153 5 2
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1448 5 6
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In my life when I am pursued /
by some wildly delicate thing
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1690 5 5
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if it were a child/ it would be in first grade this year
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1257 5 2
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Her legs splayed out
in front of her.
She was a mess
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1316 5 5
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then something like a shark gnawing on a harpsichord. Her drum kit apparently is an entire laundromat. A pocketful of marbles spilling in rivulets, down a set of narrow linoleum steps, merrily as two warblers splashing in a birdbath. several octaves below
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378 5 2
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Albert's alarm was on the verge of being dispelled by the cognac when another occurrence rattled him. In one of his vest pockets he located a short note addressed to him by Schrödinger. “—but no, this cannot be!”
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2292 5 3
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Chapter One In the Woods Everett Finn liked white-bread sandwiches. In June, Flora forfeited all her free cafeteria lunches to sit with him during his quiet lunch breaks in the classroom. "Eleven more days until graduation," she told him. He sat…
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